Saturday, May 21, 2016

Review - Leviathan's Blood - Ben Peek

I’m not overstating things when I say that Ben Peek is one of the most accomplished writers of richly detailed and intricately plotted epic fantasy working in Australia today. When I reviewed The Godless, the first book in his Children trilogy, I said Peek gave George RR Martin a run for his money. Book Two, Leviathan’s Blood,keeps him well and truly at that high-water mark.

The world of the Children trilogy is suitably epic in scope, wrecked as it has been by the aftermath of a battle between the gods that took place thousands of years ago. The sun is shattered, making its way across the sky in a series of broken shards. The sea is dark and toxic, flooded with the blood of the titular Leviathan. The mountains have grown on the back of god-corpses. And the people live in fear of the god-touched, receptacles of the remnants of godly power that spilled across the land in the final terrible conflict.

The god-touched are immortal. Five of the earliest raised empires, fought terrible battles, destroyed whole nations and wrought awful suffering across the face of the globe. In The Godless one of these, Zaifyr – who can harness the power of the dead – was trapped in the siege of the mountain city of Mireea by the army of a new child goddess coming out of the nearby land of Leera. A goddess who threatened to start a new cycle of wars that would kill countless millions. But Zaifyr discovered her power had an even darker side, preventing the dead from leaving this plane so that not even death was a release from suffering.

In Leviathan’s Blood, Zaifyr travels with the Mirreeans, fleeing the Leeran army of the child goddess to the rocky land of Yeflam, perched above the deadly ocean. There he is to stand trial for the murder of two Keepers – god-touched members of the Yeflam Enclave – who have tried to infect the Mireeans with a deadly disease. But what he really wants is to rally the Yeflam people to fight against the new goddess and free the living and the dead.

But not all the people of Yeflam are happy to see so many Mireeans on their borders:

The afternoon’s sun had sunk beneath the black ocean when the pieces of paper began to settle on the dirt and sand. For a while, they went unnoticed: Lieutenant Mills, white and gray-haired, had finished recording who would share with whom when a piece of paper came snaking along the narrow lanes. It stuck on the cloth of a freshly staked tent, where it was picked up by a guard. Ayae was one of the next to pick up a piece. It was a single sheet of Yeflam’s dirt-coloured recycled paper, with the words GO BACK HOME written in big, block letters on it. When she showed it to Caeli, who stood next to her, the guard swapped her for one with a picture of the Mireean people standing on the edge of Yeflam. They were tipping the great stone city as if it were a boat, tipping it into the waiting Leeran forces, which held swords and catapults and stood on the bones of their enemies. Ayae balled up the picture in her hand and turned to the stone platform of Neela behind her, where the city’s lamp revealed children throwing the papers over the edge gleefully.

With the people of Mireea in a precarious situation, Buerlan Le, the mercenary who was sent with his band to spy on the goddess, is now on a personal mission to the homeland he was exiled from, carrying a bottle containing the soul of his dead comrade. And Heast, the Captain of the Spine, is released from his role as protector of the Mireeans when he learns that Refuge – the mercenary group he used to command – still has need of him.

Actions have consequences that are rooted not just in the socio-political truth of the times – a truth that could be ripped from the front page of today’s real-world newspapers – but also in the characters, the cities, the alliances and rivalries, the personal and shared histories and myths of Leviathan’s Blood. Such richly detailed storytelling makes for a strong degree of verisimilitude despite the more fantastic elements it contains. This is a world and a group of characters you can believe in.

It’s true to say that as a result the plot is not particularly fast-paced. This isn’t ‘shot-glass fantasy’, delivering a sudden jolt and a euphoria that fades all too quickly without leaving much of an aftertaste. This is a story to be decanted slowly into a brandy snifter and warmed in your hands as you savour its complexity.

It’s equally impressive to realise that after what has gone before in The Godless, everything we thought we knew and understood changes in Leviathan’s Blood as we learn more about the characters as they move out into a wider and far more dangerous world. This is not a ‘placeholder’ book, marking time for the trilogy’s final volume.

If I were allowed one quibble, it’s the shortness of the chapters, particularly in the first half of the book. At times I felt I’d only really got into the swing of a particular narrative thread before the focus of the novel jumped elsewhere.

While there is much to ponder in the story, there’s also some impressive action amongst the revelations and worldbuilding. Peek writes fight scenes very well and when his characters exercise their god-like powers it plays out across the inner eye like some dark and gritty superhero movie mashed together with the best Ang Lee-inspired martial arts film. This is a vicious world and it forces those blessed or cursed with power to make equally vicious choices:

She blocked a second cut, made a wild slash with her sword and almost – the road leading to the carriage beckoned emptily as she landed – made her way through, but the mounted soldiers came charging and she felt a blade cut into her shoulders.

Her blade swept round impossibly fast and cut the following soldier from his horse. The animal rose on its legs and she dodged back. More riders came and Ayae felt her control slip as she met the thrust of another woman. She twisted the weapon out of the woman’s grasp and grabbed her arm to pull her from the horse. She could feel the warmth in her own body, close, so very close to overwhelming her, and saw the woman recoil from the heat in Ayae’s hand. The mail sleeve began to melt, burning it into the skin of the soldier as the horse, feeling its coat smoulder, recoiled in fear and reared, throwing the woman across the stone road. Ayae took the woman’s fallen blade, longer than her first, and watched as flame immediately ran along the steel.

It’s impossible to provide an overview of the scope of the story here. Leviathan’s Blood covers a lot of ground, deepening our understanding and introducing new threats, new and terrifying characters, new lands and new wonders all vividly and indelibly portrayed.

If you’re a lover of epic fantasy and you’re not reading the Children books, you’re missing out.

Mailing List Pop-Up

SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks